Automatically detect new windows hosts for WMI data collection?

[wilhelmF]

Our company has a cloud. For the cloud VMs we don't want to install Splunk Agents on every new VM and therefore we would like to receive the Windows Events via WMI. We know about the disatvantages but we need to go down this road. My question is there a way that we can automatically collect eventlogs from every new VM without specifing the new VM in the conf file?

[FrankVl]

Only thing I can think of is somehow automating the maintenance of the conf file. Set up some script that gets an updated list of hosts from some source (AD?) and generates the required WMI configuration for each of them.

An alternative could be to look at using Windows Event Forwarding, to sent events from all your VMs to a smaller set of collectors, on which you then install a Universal Forwarder to collect and forward the logs. Windows Event Fowarding (using source initiated subscriptions) can be managed through GPOs and in such a way that I think it should work in such a dynamic environment (although you might have some challenges properly distributing the load across the collectors, but that also depends on how large the environment is).